“I don’t know when you are lying, Mother, and when you are telling the truth. That’s the whole problem.”

It’s her sadness that impresses me, the sense of loss.

“You won’t tell us what you are up to, will you?” she continues. “This grand plan of yours.”

I shake my head. “I am just like you, Livia. I don’t know if I can trust you.”

She bristles at this. “I brought you here, Mother. I found you shelter! I pulled Thomas aside when he wanted to stop you from infecting the child. I did all this because you promised me answers.”

“Yes, you did all this. But will you tell me who hid you after Julius shot at you? Where those clothes come from?”

My daughter stands silent, head bowed.

“You see, my dear, we really are much the same.”

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I don’t want to let her go. She has turned around twice now, and each time I have called her back with a question, something stupid, aimless, asked only to force another moment of her time. It is the first time in years we have attempted any sort of exchange, beyond trading hurtful nothings across the dinner table. But in this specialised skill of talking to one’s daughter I feel utterly inept.

“Tell me,” I try again, inching forward onto more treacherous conversational ground. “What do you want, out of all this?”

When she looks at me in puzzlement, I make a gesture that is meant to encompass the enterprise in which we find ourselves grudging partners, but largely seems directed at the bed. It is fitting enough: not an hour ago found me flat on my knees and fumbling underneath the bed frame, hiding my secrets like some old woman afraid of being robbed. There is not a piece of furniture in the whole room that could be locked.

“Sebastian and I are changing the world,” I add. “There must be something that you want.”

To her credit I see her struggle with it. She is about to give me something pat and worthy, a nunnish answer long-rehearsed. But I have asked her earnestly and earnestness is one thing she finds hard to resist.

“I want to be certain again,” she says at length, “of who I am and what is truth. I want to be inscrutable, immovable, safe in myself. Can you do this, Mother?”

She says it softly, because she knows the answer.

“No, I cannot.”

“What, then, will you do?”

I repeat what I told her before. “I will give the world justice.”

“Virtue?”

“Justice is virtue,” I say, quoting someone my husband was fond of, one of his Greeks.

My daughter wrinkles her nose at this, turns around and leaves.

I retrieve the brush and finish with my hair.

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